Urban Games, Part 3

During the last days we have written about the phenomenon of urban gaming, coming with beautiful examples of youngsters chasing each other in the streets of today’s world cities. Those urban games are not just games; they certainly make a statement or show a profound fascination towards our social realm and public space. ‘Pacmanhattan’ already showed how interesting and weird urban games can get when you combine the digital with the physical.

Today I read an article on the Make blog about ‘Parallel Kingdom’, a new mobile/urban game that “brings new meaning to Role Playing Games by using GPS to place the virtual world on top of the real world. Attack, chat and interact with your friends and anyone else around you.” The game is downloadable for iPhones as well as for Android-running devices. For the moment the game can only be played in the United States, but it will be brought to more countries in the near future.

Parallel Kingdom makes use of Google Maps to show your current location, surrounded by a few blocks. This means you can only see other players that are nearby in the real world. Collecting items, finding and chasing opponents and battling with them means physically moving to another location in the city. This all results in “a combination of straightforward video game play combined with the fun of discovery found in geocaching”, is stated in the article. It all sounds really interesting. It also makes me curious of how many of those mobile games will be launched in the years to come.

Back in 2012 we wrote about an urban game STREETPONG played while waiting at the traffic light. We are happy to hear and spread the word that the project got the green light and that the game is now installed at one of the intersections in Hildesheim, Germany.

Tweet Land is an interesting new platform for video games that are able to interact with real-time happenings on Twitter. The arcade-like game-play integrates things and situations people in your social network tweet about. When someone, for instance, tweets about a plane crash, you’ll have to deal with this in the game you play. When…

Dutch artist Edwin Deen came up with a new machine to instantly create rainbow patterns on walls. Using a sprinkler installation that’s normally used to water the garden, the machine is able to turn any tunnel or alley into a fresh rainbow like space. Currently part of the ‘Use it Again’ exhibition at the Ampelhaus in Oranienbaum, Deen’s Rainbow Machine can also be used for indoor purposes as it transforms clean white spaces into almost perfect colorful gradient rooms.

Here in Amsterdam it can sometimes be a dangerous task to cross streets and walk without thinking. There are cars and bicycles everywhere, not to mention other pedestrians, who are so keen on getting to their destination as quick as possible. For foreign people it can therefore be a hard thinking to just stroll through the city. Walkonomics tries to change this by showing the ‘walkability’ of streets around the world and helping you explore the city while you enjoy your walk.